Awakening
by Ardent Kat
Summary: Chapter 3: Mitsuru shows Akihiko the ropes of being a persona-user. Akihiko experiences the fear and pain of summoning his persona for the first time. Akihiko/Mitsuru origins
1. Chapter 1

**Awakening**

Akihiko's health was shot. Ever since the world went to hell every midnight, he barely slept. His athletic build shriveled from slender to skinny and dark circles formed around his eyes like a boy caving in to a chemical habit. His old life as an ordinary student felt like a distant memory, his days now spent in dread of the howling madness each night would bring. Every midnight, during the hour that should have spanned from 12:00 to 1:00 a.m., sanity ceased and the chaos began.

He didn't remember the date of when it first started, but every other detail of that evening was still etched in his brain. After going to bed as usual, he woke up to the sound of a heart-piercing scream outside his window. He thought it was human at first—_God! A woman being stabbed?—_but as he rushed through the darkened room to his window, the scream tapered into a growling gurgle. _Some kind of animal?_

He shoved aside the curtain and stared out into the street, only to find the city transformed into a shifting black purgatory. The buildings looked centuries old, deep cracks gouged the sidewalks, and every streetlight glowed a hellish red. Shifting shadows curled along the walls, defying all logic of their light source, restless and flickering like heatless black flames.

And there were the monsters. Outside he saw what made the scream—a mutant crawling along its belly that looked half-human and half-feline, its limbs gnarled with ropy muscle. The distorted rubbery face gaped open to one side, snarling and gurgling. He staggered back from the window in disbelief and the monster jerked its head up at the sight of motion in the window. Had it seen him? The mutant beast yowled again and motion skittered out from the curling shadows all down the street. More monsters—each one a warped fusion between beast and man and inanimate object—prowled out of the alleyways and looked up to his window where the lion-beast had raised the alarm.

Akihiko stumbled away from the window, catching his bare heel on a stack of textbooks and sprawling to the floor, cracking his elbow on the hardwood when he landed. There was silence for a moment, then a wood-splintering SLAM on the front door. The slam was joined by more pounding on the door, fists and claws thundering to be let inside.

He spent the night cowering in his closet with his hands over his head, convinced he was witnessing the end of the world. Hell had arrived on earth, and it was only a matter of time before death found him. But ages later—he later found this time was a mere hour—the slamming and howling stopped. The stillness of the night returned, broken only by the shrilling of cicadas in the trees outside his window.

A dream? Could any nightmare be that realistic? The events felt so real, he thought it must have been some kind of psychotic episode. Schizophrenia could surface at any time in life, even the tender years of middle school. Had the stress of academic overachieving and the survivor's guilt over his sister's death finally made him crack? Was it because of some horrible chemical imbalance? He went to his tiny washroom, took the bottle of antidepressants from the medicine cabinet and flushed all the cheery yellow pills down the toilet. He could call the doctor in the morning, but if those pills were possibly what caused the episode, he was damned if he was taking them again. Exhausted and soaked with sweat, he fell onto his futon and sleep finally claimed him.

The next morning began like any other with twittering birds and a long walk to school. The other students made no comment about strange events in the night, sticking instead to their usual gossip about teachers they hated and the TV shows they'd watched the night before. As the day dragged on, he thought more and more that it must have been a dream, but he remembered the empty pill bottle and the lion-thing's rubbery face dripping open into a mouth, letting out a scream… His skin prickled into a cold sweat every time he thought of it, but by the time school was over, he decided against telling anyone what he'd seen. He could let it go if things just returned to normal.

But they didn't. Night after night, exactly at midnight, the suburban streets became Hell. Demons and hungry _gaki_ crawled the streets, suffering under the weight of their negative karma, hunting for more victims to make feel their pain. He slept in his closet for the first few nights. The monsters didn't seem to find him as long as he stayed indoors and did nothing to attract attention. When he was bold enough to venture out of his room, he tried to find other humans during the hell hour. Surely if he could find someone sane, they could explain away the phantoms he was seeing. If someone could stand there blandly in the face of the prowling shadows like they weren't there, he could finally be convinced he was having some kind of psychotic episode, that it was all in his head and the monsters couldn't hurt him. But he could find no other humans during the hell hour. Everyone turned into black-lacquered coffins during that time—his foster parents, drivers in their cars, even the homeless wino on the street corner. He was the only living thing in this psychotic world. Besides the monsters, of course. And he'd found no evidence that they couldn't tear him apart at the joints like a training dummy.

His health rapidly deteriorated for lack of sleep. Every night before midnight, he stared wide-eyed at his ceiling, dreading the inevitable moment when the clock struck twelve and the screaming and skittering began. When it was over, he would collapse into sleep, but the few hours of rest could barely counteract the exhaustion and stress that the one hour of horror had caused. Adding his boxing practice, physical training, and academic studies, it was all he could do to stay awake during class. What little social life he had dried up to nothing as his classmates found him twitchy and anxious like never before. He would leap to a defensive stance at the slightest screech from someone pushing their chair back. He could only snort in annoyance at the other middle school students who claimed that their life was hell because they had homework or their parents withheld their allowance for a week. His reputation as a stuff-shirt overachiever transformed into that of a boy on the edge, prone to fist fights and delinquent behavior. It wasn't true, but that never stopped the rumor mill from churning. He didn't have time for a social life in any case, so if people left him alone, he didn't care. He was going mad, nothing could stop it, and it wasn't getting better with time.

He kept his sightings of the midnight hell to himself like a perverted secret, knowing full well that his life would only get worse if he opened his mouth and shared the madness of his visions with someone else.

Fortunately, that Someone Else came to him.


	2. Chapter 2

_Author's note: All dialog up to "With this, you can challenge them" is taken directly from the flashback into Akihiko's past seen in P3:FES. All other details and inner thoughts are speculations by the author._

**Chapter 2**

God, he was tired. Akihiko trudged down the hall to the locker room after his latest boxing match with a towel around his neck and his boxing gloves dangling from one hand. He'd upheld his flawless record with yet another K.O., but it was impatience as much as skill that let him snap out the winning punch. He was so exhausted, he didn't have the stamina to dance around for a points-based T.K.O. He thought, "Let's get this over with," and lunged forward with his diminishing strength. The next thing he remembered was the startled look of disbelief on his opponent's face before the boy hit the mat in a daze. The crowd surged and cheered, but the praise that once fueled Akihiko's self-esteem now only exacerbated the start of a splitting headache.

A gaggle of teen girls followed him out of the gym, chattering about his victory and following him shamelessly into the boy's locker room while he tried to ignore them. A talent scout approached and offered him half of a full scholarship if he'd box for a different school and Akihiko almost laughed. Between trying to maintain his grades and his sanity, the last thing he needed was to transfer to a new school for the sake of pride or money. He probably should have quit boxing entirely and let his body rest during those hours to make up for the sleep he lost every night, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He'd made a promise to his departed sister, Miki, that he'd become strong. He wanted to live with integrity for her sake as well as his. But selfishly, he knew Miki wasn't the only reason he continued to fight. He had to believe there was something constructive and beautiful in his life, an accomplishment beyond maintaining his grades and decelerating his rapid slide into madness. If he wasn't living for this, what was he living for? And what if one day his physical strength was the only thing that could save him from the monsters that prowled the streets at midnight?

"Akihiko-kun is so handsome and intense," one of the girls whispered to another.

"Did you see how he blew off that talent scout? I knew he'd never switch to some loser school. Akihiko only wants the best."

Ugh! They wouldn't leave! All he wanted was to head home and crash on his futon, but his simpering fanclub still lingered in the boys' locker room, fluttering their hands and cooing flattering gossip to one another.

He exhaled a snarling breath. Fine. If they couldn't take a hint, he'd tell them off directly. "Would you get out already!" he snapped. He turned to face them, already feeling guilty, but instead of the look of wounded surprise he expected to see, the girls' eyes glittered with excitement.

"He's so cool!" one of them whispered.

He dropped his boxing gloves in disbelief. Even his rudeness was subject to their idolatry.

To his relief, the boxing team captain herded the girls back into the hallway and the door closed behind him. Alone at last, Akihiko filled his lungs with the blissful solitude, then exhaled in a heavy sigh. He stripped off his shirt, wiped his face with it, and tossed it in his gym bag. He'd just hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his boxing shorts and pulled them down enough to reveal the angle of one pale hip when he heard a voice behind him chuckling.

"Couldn't you have handled that a little more politely?"

He yanked his shorts back up and whirled to see a girl with wine-red ringlets standing in the doorway of the gym teacher's office. Her long eyelashes were lowered as she kept her eyes politely averted, but somehow the sly smirk twisting the edge of her mouth made him feel like he was completely naked.

"I've heard you get mobbed after practice, so I thought I'd wait in here instead," she said.

Akihiko hastily pulled his shirt back on. He should have been angry at the intrusion, doubly so since she was hiding like that, but somehow the girl sent a bolt through him that made him feel… invigorated as well as annoyed. A strange combination.

"Third year. Class C. Akihiko Sanada," she said, looking up to face him. She spoke as though she owned him, possessive as a military general addressing an underling.

"What do you want?" He tried to sound cold and disinterested, but for some reason, his throat cramped painfully when he spoke.

"Aren't you going to ask who I am?" As if that would be the most pressing question in his mind.

"No need," he said. "Whatever you've come for, I don't want to get involved. All I want is to train and get stronger." He slammed his locker closed. Fine. If he couldn't change while this girl was standing there, he'd head home in his boxing clothes. Anything for a little rest at last.

She held out a hand to stop him. "It's nothing troublesome. I have a very simple request." Her eyes flicked up and down over him as if sizing up a horse she might like to buy.

"A request?" What could this girl possibly want from him? Besides what all the other girls wanted, that is. He thought again to how close he'd come to stripping completely out of his sweaty clothes right in front of her.

"I have enemies that need defeating," she said in a tone as matter-of-fact as if she were placing an order at the cafeteria.

He rolled his eyes. Oh, great. Bully trouble. He'd been approached about this before. When would people realize that boxing was about athleticism, not violence? And even if he felt like throwing a punch outside the ring and without his gloves, why would he do it as a favor to some spying stranger? He was about to tell her no when she interrupted.

"They're not people, I assure you. You wouldn't be bound by the rules of boxing. No, the enemies I speak of… They're related to what you've been experiencing each midnight."

Akihiko's eyes widened. She knew! She saw them, too. Immediately he felt a surge of relief that he wasn't alone; he wasn't crazy. But his giddiness quickly soured. This also confirmed that the nightmares were real. She was talking about facing the prowling monsters, _fighting _them. He fished his mouth open, then shut again, trying in vain to decide which of his hundreds of questions to ask first.

"You see, I'm in the same situation," the girl said. She examined her perfectly-manicured nails, trying to look casual. Considering the subject of midnight monsters, she _did_ look cool, if a little haughty. She also had a powerful air of precocious rich girl about her, someone used to getting her way. "I experience the same thing you do," she said. "The difference is that _I_ know what it means. If you come with me, I'll share what I know with you."

It was exactly what he wanted to hear, which only made him suspicious. Even if she went through the exact same thing he did at night, how did she know about him? He didn't remember ever meeting her. "Who are you?"

"Mitsuru Kirijo." She didn't bow in greeting, but simply stood with her head held high, hugging her elbows against her chest. "I'm a third year like yourself."

_Kirijo? I've heard that name before._

"You said you wanted to build your strength. What you really need is a riskier challenge." She strode towards him, her heeled boots clacking on the locker room's tile floor. As she walked, she reached casually into her book satchel. When she was only two paces away, she pulled out a gun from her bag. "With this, you can challenge… _them_."

Akihiko's eyes flew wide as if he'd just seen her draw out a needle full of heroin. It was illegal for civilians to own guns in Japan. Even the entire Tokyo police force only fired a half-dozen shots or so in an average year. A civilian couldn't so much as _hold _a gun without a license and here this girl was bringing one to school! She held the gun out to him with the grip pointing forward as if inviting him to take it.

"Them?" Akihiko repeated numbly. He didn't move to take the gun.

Mitsuru's shoulders slumped as if in mild disappointment. "They're called shadows. The monsters that come out at night." As calmly as if she were putting away a compact, she returned the gun to her book bag. "We both see them. No one else does."

Akihiko ground his molars together and looked away, his fists clenched and his heart racing. _What do I do?_

He wanted her to be telling the truth. He wanted to prove her a liar.

_What do I do?_

His eyes darted along the ground as if looking for answers, his mind racing.

Mitsuru clicked shut the clasp of her bag. "You know I'm telling the truth. The only question now is what you'll do about it. I choose to fight."

His voice was thin as a thread. "Sh-show me."

She arched an eyebrow, not quite hearing him. "Hmm?"

"Show me how to fight them. Then I'll decide."

The smug curl returned to the edge of her crimson lips as if this were the answer she'd expected all along. "All right," she said. "Meet me at 11:30 tonight and I'll show you."

"That late?"

"Tell your parents the astronomy club is meeting at the school tonight."

He didn't bother correcting her that his guardians were foster parents. He began to protest. "But I'm not even in the astron—"

"Do they know that?"

He paused. "No."

She drew out a name card from the front pocket of her bag and handed it to him. The paper looked expensive and her name and contact information was printed in an elegant script on the front. On the back she'd already hand-written instructions on where to meet and when. "Wonderful," she said with finality. "I'll see you tonight, then."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Akihiko swallowed hard and his saliva went down like a solid lump. "So, you don't have to, ahh, make preparations or anything?"

"No," Mitsuru said calmly. She pulled out the thing that looked exactly like a handgun but she called an invoker. She said it wasn't for using on the monsters like he'd expected, but to use on themselves, which immediately worried him. It sounded too much like the many tales of lovers' double-suicides in his Japanese lit class. Akihiko licked his lips and suddenly wondered if she was lying to him about this whole thing.

_But how could she have known about the monsters and the midnight horror she called the Dark Hour?_

"I recommend you brace yourself the first time," she cautioned. "If you expect the worst, the sensation's not so bad, but it would probably be a rude shock if you weren't ready for it."

_Sounds like she's describing death. _"You're going first, right?"

"Of course."

Shortly before midnight, they met in the shopping district near Akihiko's apartment. There was a movie theater there and it wouldn't look suspicious to find a couple of teenagers out late. Akihiko worried that they wouldn't have a place to hide once the Dark Hour started, but Mitsuru just smiled when he voiced his concern.

"You'll see," she said. "Once you know how to use an invoker, the shadows will be the ones with reason to fear _you_."

Akihiko shivered with anxiety while the clock ticked down to midnight. He pretended to be cold and practiced his boxing footwork, bouncing in place to expel his nervous energy.

At midnight exactly, the Dark Hour smothered the world. Shadows cast by streetlights slithered up the walls, cracks appeared in the movie theater's stucco, and the friendly mall topiaries sprawled with new tendrils of thorns. Standing outside and watching the darkness infect miles around him was vastly worse than watching the change in the confines of his room. It was like the whole world had turned to hell. He was instantly grateful for Mitsuru's presence. Her eyes followed the same changes and he knew she was seeing the same things, but her poise never wavered. She stood confident and cool, the invoker in her hand.

A monster the size of a dog scuttled into view from an alley. It looked like a severed hand skittering nimbly along on the tips of its fingers, but it had two eyes near where the wrist should have been. The eyes were perfectly circular and solid black, dead and hollow as a shark's. The creature fidgeted in place for a moment, its finger-feet pattering restlessly. Then it rushed towards them.

Akihiko never felt so naked and vulnerable in front of the monsters before. Suddenly he wished there were bullets in that gun-thing of Mitsuru's after all. "Hey…" He turned to face Mitsuru.

She stood with feet shoulder-width apart, serene confidence on her young face, and planted the invoker against her temple. She pulled the trigger.

"No!" Akihiko's cry was drowned out by the crack of gunfire.

A spray of brains and bone shrapnel flew from the far side of her head and Mitsuru's body began to fall. Akihiko stood dumbly in place in disbelief, the monster momentarily forgotten.

_I just watched a girl commit suicide. I was standing right here and she—_

But Mitsuru calmly regained her footing after she'd staggered in place for a moment. The spray he saw blasting out the other side of her head dissipated into a blue-gray haze of ectoplasm. Behind her stood a female knight, hovering a foot off the ground like a ghost, but with a body as solid-looking as Mitsuru herself. At nearly six feet tall, the knight dwarfed Mitsuru in size. It wore a heavy jouster's helmet that covered its entire head, with a matching steel breastplate forged to fit a woman's curves. Besides the breastplate and helmet, the specter wore no armor. It was clothed in a cuffed and collared coat that looked like a man's suit, but with a distinctive feminine cut. In one hand it clutched an épée with a parrying dagger in the other.

Akihiko watched slack-jawed. He felt he should have some comment to make, but only a weak croak emerged from his throat.

Mitsuru's guardian swooped forward and slashed the scuttling hand monster neatly in two. The monster's two halves slid apart for a moment, then dissipated into shadow like a puff of vapor. As soon as the monster was destroyed, the knight drifted back towards Mitsuru, turning translucent, then transparent, until it disappeared entirely.

"There." Mitsuru tossed one of her ringlets over her shoulder primly. "That's how it's done."

"What was that thing?"

"It's called a persona." Mitsuru glanced away when she said it. She looked as though she were keeping watch for another monster, but Akihiko thought he saw something like embarrassment on her face.

"You're saying I can make a knight like that?"

"Not exactly. Each person's persona looks different. Like the name implies, a persona is a fragment of your own personality. It's partly your true self, but it's also the face you want other people to see." For a moment, her embarrassed expression flickered to something that might have been guilt, but then it was gone. "The self-image you present to protect yourself from being hurt."

He wondered if there was some deeper metaphor in the fact that her persona appeared heavily armored and masked her face. He didn't relish the thought of finding out what his own looked like. He thought he was going to learn how to fight, not bare his soul in front of a stranger. "So everybody's got one of these personas?"

She lowered her eyelashes and shook her head. "Only those of us who can see the Dark Hour."

"How many of us are there?" Hopeful thoughts of a well-equipped underground resistance rose in his mind.

She met his gaze soberly. "As far as we know? Just the two of us."

He blinked.

"Are you ready to try?" She pulled out a second invoker and held it out to him.

He held his palms up as if in self-defense and didn't reach for the gun. "Whoah. Not exactly. I wouldn't know the first thing to do. You didn't give me any instructions or anything."

She smirked at him. "Finger goes here." She pointed at the trigger guard. "Then squeeze." She pointed away from them and pulled the trigger. This time the invoker discharged with an empty click like an unloaded gun. "It's not that complicated." She held it out to him.

He took the invoker from her timidly. It weighed a lot more in his hands than he thought it would. Probably because the only guns he'd held before were plastic toys. "Can I use yours? What if this one doesn't work?"

"No ammo but your own ego," she explained. "It won't fire until you have it against your head."

"That's comforting," he muttered. Again he wondered if this was all a ridiculous hoax. What if the gun was loaded and he ended up splattering his brains all over the pavement? What if it did nothing and the next monster kept charging while he clicked the trigger over and over like an idiot? But nothing about the situation felt like one of those locker room pranks that ended up with one of his guy friends pointing and laughing, "Got you!" There wasn't anything funny about it at all.

Another monster swung into view. This one looked like a crow with tattered feathers and a three-foot wing span. In its talons it clutched an iron lantern that oozed blue-black smoke. Akihiko flattened himself against the movie theater wall, the invoker held down at his side.

"Go for it," Mitsuru urged.

He turned to her, eyes wide and frantic. "Don't I get to practice or something first?"

"Your persona exists to protect you. It won't emerge unless a need arises."

"But how do I--?"

"Just go. I'm right here as backup." She held up her invoker in both hands, looking a little like a hero out of an American action movie.

Akihiko's hands trembled as he put the gun up to his head. It felt like it weighed twenty pounds.

The ragged-looking crow monster spotted them and swooped down.

_Whether or not this works, my problems will be over soon._

He pulled the trigger.

He was braced for pain, but not this. An invisible hand squeezed his heart in its fist and suddenly he couldn't breathe like he was having a panic attack. He fell to his knees. Fire lanced through his brain, slicing it in two, and Pandora's box of horrors came screaming out from the cracks of his torn psyche. He felt his inner strength surge forward, but not just the noble side of him. Sneering cynicism. Teeth-gnashing envy. Arrogance disguised as self-confidence. All the nasty things inside of him flooded to the surface of his mind, forcing him to stare directly into the ugliness he preferred to stay blind to.

Then a pale figure materialized in front of him, a hulking man wearing padded armor that looked like riot gear. Unlike Mitsuru's persona, this one was not only unarmed, but its feet and hands were disproportionately tiny, save for the right arm which ended in a lance that eerily resembled a hypodermic needle.

The persona lunged forward just as the ragged crow monster swooped down for the kill. The two collided and the monster screamed in pain. The persona slashed with its needle arm and the bird exploded into a cloud of black feathers that dissolved into shadowy mist.

Akihiko had been so surprised to see his persona appear, then engrossed in the combat, he barely noticed that the mental pain had stopped. In hindsight, it only lasted an instant. The realities of the physical world swam back to him. Akihiko retched in his mouth a little, then spat on the pavement. The pale guardian of his persona didn't disappear right away, but turned around to look back at him.

For the first time, Akihiko saw the persona's face. It was almost entirely hidden in the thick padding of its riot gear armor and only two white eyes peered out over the top, like a turtle with its head half tucked down into its shell. The eyes were blank white with no pupils and with dark curving eyelashes. Its long blond hair flowed all the way down its back. After a moment of staring back at Akihiko mutely, the persona vanished into nothingness.

"Interesting," Mitsuru said. A bemused smile twisted her lips.

Akihiko felt suddenly exposed. Between the striking eyes and long hair, his persona looked distinctly feminine in spite of its hulking frame. He wondered if this reflected something about himself or if this was a fragment of his sister Miki locked away inside him.

"Well done," Mitsuru said. "I wasn't sure you were going to pull the trigger."

His voice came out more sullen and petulant than he meant it to. "It would have killed me if I hadn't."

"I was right beside you the whole time," Mitsuru said. "You did well."

An awkward silence followed. Akihiko rose to his feet, his knees aching and bruised from when he'd fallen to the ground.

"Care to try it again?" Mitsuru twirled her invoker around her finger like a sharpshooter. Showing off for the newbie.

"Does it always feel like that?" He pressed the heel of his hand to his head. His nervous stomach finally began to settle.

She shook her head. "You get used to it. The first one's the worst. So congratulations on surviving your initiation."

She held out her hand to congratulate him but Akihiko turned away without acknowledging her, pretending not to see her extended hand. He knew it was petty to snub her like that, but he was getting tired of her know-it-all confidence. He needed to tip the social scales in his own favor, if only for a moment. For the first time he wondered if this selfish impulse was the sort of thing that contributed to his persona.

Mitsuru planted her knuckles on her hips and tossed her hair primly. "Well? Are you up for a little training?"

Not exactly. After weeks of sleep deprivation, his post-adrenaline crash made him feel ready to sleep for a week. But professional athletes train whether they feel like it or not. He would never get stronger unless he challenged himself.

"I'm ready," he said. He and Mitsuru both held their invokers at the ready, listening to the scratching sounds of more monsters skittering towards them. "Bring it on."


End file.
